At Thanksgiving tables across the country, families and friends vainly tried to steer conversations away from the presidential election and impeding transitional period. Inevitably, however, dinner table discussion veered toward Donald Trump’s surprisingly decisive electoral college win (and his more than two million popular-vote deficit), reports of a civil war within his transition team, his myriad conflicts of interest, and whom he should pick to fill out his cabinet.

This was true, too, at Mar-A-Lago, Trump’s 20-acre Palm Beach club, which is now being dubbed “the Winter White House” in some quarters. Before guests tucked into their ahi tuna martinis or “Mr. Trump’s Wedge Salad”, talk turned to the president-elect’s transition.
According to The New York Post’s Page Six, the president-elect sat at a large table by the fireplace in the club’s living room—surrounded by his wife Melania and sons Eric and Barron—and esteemed guests including Don King, Fabio, Marvel C.E.O. Ike Perlmutter, and Richard Nixon’s grandson, Christopher.
Trump apparently spent much of the holiday meal prodding his guests about who he thinks would make the best candidate for secretary of state: his onetime critic Mitt Romney or full-time crony Rudy Giuliani. “Donald was walking around asking everybody he could about Romney, and a lot of people like Rudy,” a "spy" told Page Six.

Trump has a history of asking neophyte friends and family about the most critical appointments. Earlier this year, he reportedly solicited opinions from fund-raiser attendees about who he should choose to be his running mate before he settled on Mike Pence. This reality TV-inspired style gels with the general manner in which Trump has composed his cabinet, summoning supplicants to Trump Tower in front of throngs of media for private conversations and public guessing games presumably answered on the next episode. The only difference is that America is a country, he is somehow in charge of it, and some 300 millions lives are in the balance.

The Secretary of State quandary appears to have set off a larger debate within Trump's inner circle. His campaign manager ans current advisor Kellyanne Conway spent the long weekend airing others' frustrations with Romney on [Twitter(https://twitter.com/KellyannePolls/status/802884826520907776), a point she reiterated across the Sunday morning shows. “People feel betrayed to think that Gov. Romney, who went out of his way to question the character and the intellect and the integrity of Donald Trump, now our president-elect, would be given the most significant cabinet post of all,” she said on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. “It’s just breathtaking in scope and intensity the type of messages I’ve received from all over the country” she had said an hour earlier on CNN.

Of course, having a top adviser go on national television to criticize a top pick being considered by her boss is not the norm, either, whether it was meant as a play to publicly push him into a choice (which she denies) or publicly exact revenge on a vocal critic. Two sources, perhaps as intimately placed as Page Six’s “spy” told Morning Joe that Trump is “furious” with Conway over her behavior.

While Donald Trump spent his holiday forking at the Three Layer Trump Chocolate Cake at the Winter White House and wistfully eyeing Fabio’s hair at the table next to him, President Obama spent his holiday with his family at the White House White House, after they all served dinner to veterans at a nearby homeless center. Maybe it’s not fair to compare, yet. Trump has just weeks to soak up the last licks of being an average billionaire and doing average billionaire things and celebrating holidays like an average billionaire before he has to be a public servant. (A servant!) And Secret Service have already started to lurk around the halls of Mar-a-Lago and park hideous-looking boats in the water outside and clog up traffic nearby with their non-luxury vehicles. Let him eat that Three Layer Trump Chocolate Cake while he can.